Modeling polypharmacy side effects with graph convolutional networks

Understand

The use of drug combinations, termed polypharmacy, is common to treat patients with complex diseases and co-existing conditions.

• However, a major consequence of polypharmacy is a much higher risk of adverse side effects for the patient.
• Polypharmacy side effects emerge because of drug-drug interactions, in which activity of one drug may change if taken with another drug.
• The knowledge of drug interactions is limited because these complex relationships are rare, and are usually not observed in relatively small clinical testing.